Free Stiltsville: A Novel by Susanna Daniel Page A

and I arrived at the campground, which was little more than a small island rising from the marsh, enough room for the canoes and tents and a picnic table and a few folding chairs. A tributary ran behind the mound of land, and a stand of cypress trees provided privacy that turned out to be irrelevant: we wouldn’t see another human the entire weekend. Dennis used a machete to lop off the knobs of cypress roots that grew through the island’s flattest parts, and the boys started a fire. We wore jackets over our swimsuits and cooked beans and hot dogs. We’d forgotten to bring bowls, so we ate out of mugs and cans, and once we’d settled in and darkness had fallen, the wildlife closed in around us. Owls made their strange humanlike calls, and every so often the muscular tail of an alligator splashed and a bullfrog croaked. “This place is creepy,” said Marse, “but I can’t seem to go a year without a visit.” Her grandfather owned an old swamp house nearby, in Big Cypress—the government had been trying to buy him out since the preserve had been established twenty years earlier—and she told stories about using the outhouse and listening to panthers scavenging in the trash cans. During a lag in the conversation, I heard a grunt, and when I asked what it was, Bette answered, “Those are swamp pigs, rooting. They only come out at night.” I could barely tell where the sounds were coming from, there were so many, and when finally Dennis and I crawled into our sleeping bags, I lay awake for an hour or more, listening.
    In the morning, the men took off in two canoes to fish and Bette and Marse and I stayed behind. The river’s glassy surface reflected the trees and tall grasses. Marse turned on a transistor radio and found a calypso station that barely came in. I had taken to wearing a swimsuit almost all the time, even when I wasn’t planning on going in the water—this was something Marse and Bette did—and had even bought a new one, an orange-red halter with a zodiac pattern. Over the suit, I wore an old pair of Dennis’s jeans that I’d cut across the thighs without hemming. I was tanner than I’d ever been and several pounds thinner, and had grown comfortable spending time outside in the sun, under a fishing hat Gloria had handed me at Stiltsville. We talked about Bette’s wedding and Marse’s love life—there was a guy from her office, a fling—and they asked me questions about Atlanta. No one asked when I was going home. No one ever asked.
    It was South Floridian spring, which meant bright warm days and few mosquitoes, and nights as crisp as seventy degrees. We drank coffee until noon, then switched to cans of watery, ice-cold beer. After we’d been drinking for an hour or so, Bette wandered off to go to the bathroom, and Marse started cleaning up the campsite. I wanted her to sit down and relax with me, to enjoy the sunshine and the privacy and even the strange hollow calls of the wildlife around us. “We should do this again,” I said to Marse.
    “Sure.”
    “I mean it. We should make it an annual thing.”
    She looked at me strangely and started to speak, then stopped.
    “What?” I said, but she didn’t answer. I couldn’t see any problem with what I’d said, but then it occurred to me: I’d taken to acting as if I was certain of my future in Miami, but at this point there was no ring on my finger. In Marse’s mind, I might have been a placeholder in Dennis’s life. “Marse,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
    “I know.”
    “This isn’t a lark. I’m not . . . ” I couldn’t think of the right word. “An affair .”
    “I know you’re not.” She took a breath. “I just wish we could forget what I told you when we met, about Dennis.”
    “Why?”
    She stuffed beer cans into a trash bag. “It was really no big deal. Nothing would have come of it.”
    “I understand.”
    “I wasn’t in love with him or anything.”
    I hadn’t realized all that had gone unsaid